Edmonton Becomes Home, a personal story
Date: 1954
Headlines, city section, Edmonton Journal, 1954: "Edmonton's population has grown 20% in just two years!" Such was the population explosion that new areas like Windsor Park and Belgravia appeared, and old districts like King Edward and Ritchie were expanding. The university was responding to the need for research in engineering created by the oil and gas boom as well as rising hope in tar sands viability. Together these contributed to a very lively immigration to Alberta's capital city from far and wide.
I came to Edmonton after four years of rural teaching to honour a scholarship from my school division of origin, to be near the university for summer schools and evening classes to complete my degree. Very few teachers afforded continuous attendance to complete an education degree before starting their earning. Ross Shepard, Superintendent of schools, when interviewing me, kindly placed me at King Edward, an easy ten-minute walk from my suite. This was, in turn, a twenty-minute walk the other direction to the university. In fact, I soon learned that King Edward itself had been an early location of the university in 1909.
Thus began my urban life beyond the three six-week summer schools I had accessed from Athabasca Hall. Before the first school term in Edmonton was half over, I became aware that my roommate and friend from rural school days was to be married in July leaving me the roomy suite. Another friend from weather-reporting days following high school, told me her neighbour from Nordegg was looking for just such accommodation so that she might attend the U of A in September. I thanked my good fortune and my good friend and continued teaching, summer schooling and evening class attendance with the good company of another education student, and over suppers, her fiancé, who was a medical student also from Nordegg, but staying at a nearby Alumni house. He gave us extra incentive to "eat proper means" as our parents advised.
Inevitably, Mary Anne married her doctor beau, and I put the art of one summer course to the test in order to leave them the handy suite while Dr. Tony interned at the U of A hospital one more year. The course, expertly taught by Dr. Helen Bentley, a neighbour from Windsor Park, required fifteen women students to create each her own floor plans for a house that suited her tastes, her needs and her income. Three of us immediately had housed built from those plans and still live in them today, 50 years later. In fact, my new location would be 15 minutes from the university campus, in the northwest of Belgravia.
From my own new home, I walked daily to King Edward school, thirty-five minutes away on a monotonous breakfast soft-cooked egg, one piece of whole-grain bread, plus an orange and a glass of milk. Lunch was a peanut-butter sandwich, a carrot and an apple; supper a baked potato, a fish casserole and a green salad. After that I would don paint clothes, climb the step-ladder loaned by a new neighbour an get on with the interior decorating, a must if I was to get my mortgage to pay the builder.
Indeed without an interest-free loan from my Dad and Mom, I could not have got a smaller loan from my bank and pursued this project of home-building at all. Dad said simply: "It will make a man of you, Bet". Well, carting home backless discarded chairs the school caretaker allowed me to have, and sawing logs from trees the builders had to sacrifice were somewhat mannish tasks, but so was the persistent painting and cleaning paint brushes 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. each day after school. The logs made good drying heat in the fireplace - my major luxury, such that only one ceiling got its second coat before the undercoat was sufficiently dry, and the telltale paint peeling began to occur in the second bedroom.
Except for cutting and piling the logs and the scraps of lumber, the yard work had to wait. In any case, I wanted to preserve the profusion of bluebells, wood violets, Alberta roses, columbines and wild berries, and could not be on hand to caution a landscaper even if I could have afforded one. The fireplace also served to warm the house on cool April evenings as the temporary furnace had been removed, and the permanent one not yet installed. Now the living room furnace incinerates non-recyclable papers that would otherwise collect in boxes for another generation to sort.
Avery Steele was a fine honest builder who showed me three other homes he had completed in the vicinity. I learned of him from my banker who was enjoying one of those new homes. Mr. Steele, in turn, introduced me to a reputable and generous architect who, though fully employed with Minchau and company, took pains to do the necessary upright drawings for the window placement, roof-design, fire-place character and material, and the final blueprinting required by the city planning department. These he passed to me at a downtown restaurant between busy appointments. Both Roy Gordon and Avery Steele visited me at the end of the construction and realized the satisfaction I felt for their faithful attention to my project. There was even a wee collapsible bench under the telephone pass-though from kitchen to back hallway. Such details have made living in this home both logical, sunlit and enjoyable. Other than extra insulation in the attic, the only major addition is our attached sun parlor off the master bedroom and a spare bedroom under the sun parlor, both with access to the garden.
Arborite cabinet surfacing was new at the time. I remember Mr. Steel telling me that was the most challenging installation in the whole carpentry task. It is still in place, though a renter, while I was on sabbatical in Manitoba and North-west Ontario for 14 months, had it edged with aluminum. That renter, or rather a recuperating nephew of hers, painted the insides of the kitchen cupboards, and varnished the outer surfaces to enhance the poplar-faced plywood which holds its own beside kitchens of this day.
Years later my husband bought me a portable dishwasher, but we have since moved the gimmick away, preferring hand washing directly after baking and mealtimes.
A coat closet up four steps from the back entrance converted nicely to a second toilet on the main floor. The coat rack is right beside the back door. The basement expertly finished in brick, free and recycled by my husband, with the help in installation and wood wall covering of our three children and me, served their needs and now those of university students.
Early on, Jerry had cleverly built a wall and hung a door in it at the head of the stairway separating the two levels - this after telling me that because every scrap of wood had been burned for warmth, he had never had it for work. At that time also my European tradesman husband expertly expanded the basement recreation space by replacing a vertical bearing wall post with a horizontal ceiling-mounted I-beam, and relocating a nearby indoor storm water pipe of 10 cm diameter to a storage closet. When our youngest child reached grade nine and was already right-hand helper in his Dad's fully owned electrical business, I was back teaching and studying along with the family. In an Industrial Arts class that complimented my household Economics teaching, I made a laminated tabletop that folded down against a back wall of kitchen nook that had, when the children were little, accommodated our washing machine. Seats for either side doubled as linen storage; for sometime, a grandchild's craft center. This is now a breakfast nook and writer's corner, as I speak "How glad I am that you built that house!" These were the words of my friend and mentor, Helen Bentley, who invited Jerry and I to tea with Fred, her husband, in there lovely home the year before she died. Helen had asked permission to bring a class of hers to see our house, and I was proud to welcome them. Perhaps some students still find ways to build or revise their own homes early in their careers. I hope so, in order that they may give expression to their own ideas of how a home should function and how it can best reflect their own tastes and values. Maybe it was the cooperative effort and personal restraint required of young pioneer couples then largely rural, and facing the elements in isolation that contributed the strength of resolve and the compassion that characterized early western Canada. And today, as then, resourcefulness reaps happiness.